


Perfusion

by greywash



Series: Spring Break Creative Calisthenics [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Breakups, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-22
Updated: 2016-03-22
Packaged: 2018-05-28 03:50:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6314218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/pseuds/greywash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For many years, he’d considered that a peculiarly Holmesian quality: that skill for not saying something, so that it sounded louder than everything else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfusion

**Author's Note:**

> Over spring break, [I am asking for some prompts on Tumblr](http://fizzygins.tumblr.com/post/141318279512/okay-so-i-have-been-having-an-awful-time-with) to help me shake out the writerly cobwebs. [virtual-particle](http://virtual-particle.tumblr.com/) requested: "[ . . . ] based on dictionary of obscure sorrows, because it’s that kind of night. Sherlock: onism (n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time). [ . . . ]"
> 
> I accidentally posted the draft of this before I was done tweaking headers, so I apologize that this briefly went up without this, but: **warnings for disturbing content**. My full warning policy is in my [profile](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile); if you have any questions, please feel free to [email me](mailto:greywash@gmail.com).

Before he’d left for Eton his mother had comforted him. 

She’d told him that it would be hard, but better: better classes, better teachers, better students; and he wouldn’t be so alone. For many years, he’d considered that a peculiarly Holmesian quality: _a better class of people_ , not-said in not-his-father’s-voice, heard perfectly clearly with only Sherlock and his mum in the room; that skill for not saying something, so that it sounded louder than everything else. And it’d been true, in part: Eton _had_ been a better class of people, with better classes and teachers and students; but Sherlock had not been better, and he had been very much alone. In consequence Eton had been a disaster unmatched by (at that point) anything else, though Winchester (next) and Shrewsbury (later) would soon permit Sherlock to set new records for disappointing people, not in the least excluding himself. 

What his mother’d said had been truer, in that gooier-mushier untrue sense, when six years later he’d made it up to Cambridge: a different Holmes, a year younger than most of his fellows but alert and attentive with upright posture and his books and a battery of multi-colored underliners; that Holmes, Sherlock had thought, could do great things! could be great people! He had turned up at nearly the oldest institution of learning in the English-speaking world prepared to make a study of the universe: to measure out its length and breadth, wrap it up in paper, collect it in boxes and in jars; and he had found himself, new and raw, buzzing under his skin all over when he’d acquired a co-conspirator in the labs after-hours within a week of arriving, who then made for them both a friend of willowy blond boy, head listing always slightly to the right, who’d been in Sherlock’s room just shy of seven minutes before saying, apropos of nothing, that he could take Sherlock’s computer apart, if Sherlock wanted, and then put it back together better. It had been quite some time before Sherlock had realized that they were his friends, but then that realization had been somehow surprising; as though Sherlock had not before had friends, as though the acid-fizzing aftertaste of recognition that lingered in Sherlock’s mouth at Seb’s hands on his books or Vicky’s thoughtful, pinched frown, like the taste of some chemical sweet—it surely could not be new to him. Was it? He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember. He knew them better than his bones; he had known them before he was born. His self was their selves and they were all, the three of them, he knew, made for knowing.

"He can’t—I don’t understand,” Sherlock was saying, very slowly, from a long way away. 

“What do you mean, _can’t_ ,” Sebastian’d snapped, “there’s nothing to fucking _understand_ ,” with his red face turned down; and then he had stormed out, his differential equations textbook still tucked down next to Sherlock’s bed, with Sherlock’s orange underliner shoving the pages apart.

 _Victor_ , Sherlock had wanted to say, even though that was wrong; _Vicky_ , even though Vicky had left and then Sherlock had said _I don’t understand_ and then Seb had gone too; and Sherlock hadn’t seen any of it coming. He had known them forever but he hadn’t known them at all, he had thought there was no part of them that was not part of him and he had been wrong, he had been _wrong, he had been_ **_wrong_** ; and in their leaving it felt, he was noting, with some strange analytical apparatus that he hadn’t known until then that he possessed, like an abortion. A rending. A sundering of conjoined twins, as though Sherlock’s own body, alone, was suddenly structurally inadequate: his aorta pumping into empty air, his liver halved, his hollow gasping overworked third of a lung. His mother had comforted him, he remembered: _better classes, better teachers, better students,_ like Victor and Sebastian, leaving him on two feet inadequate to carry him door to door; _a better class of people,_ she hadn’t said, _and you won’t be quite so alone._


End file.
